This paper seeks to elucidate the politico-theological significance of the anthropotheistic position taken by Ludwig Feuerbach in his magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity (1841). In doing so, it pursues a circuitous route that begins by considering Feuerbach’s call, in a letter he sent to Hegel in 1828, for the establishment of the Alleinherrschaft or “sole sovereignty” of reason in a “kingdom of the actuality of the Idea and of existent reason.”
As a means of clarifying Feuerbach’ underlying purpose in seeking to “place the so-called Positive Philosophy in a most fatal light by showing that the original of its idolatrous image of God [Götzenbild] is man, that flesh and blood belong to personality essentially,” the paper considers the personalistic arguments against popular sovereignty, and in defense of “the monarchical principle,” advanced by Friedrich Julius Stahl, one of Feuerbach’s principle ideological adversaries and a leading mid-century theorist of political conservatism.